It was one of those things where we didn’t know how to describe it or measure it, but everybody on our team knew that the surf project blew the Grateful Dead project out of the water, but we couldn’t really say why. Because we had them at the same time I saw a difference in how people responded to them both in terms of the number of people who came and in terms of the emotional intensity and the resonance of the projects. I thought that both the surf exhibition and the Grateful Dead exhibition were relevant to our community. MAH is in Santa Cruz, and it’s a hippie town and a surf town. One was about the beginning of surfing and one was about the Grateful Dead.

I felt that both exhibitions were very relevant to our community. Nina Simon: If you’d asked me a year ago for a definition, I would have said that relevance was connected to the interests and issues of the day in a particular community.īut, last summer we did two exhibitions at MAH, and they made me question what relevance is. Jim Richardson: Your new book is about relevance, how did that come about? MuseumNext’s Jim Richardson caught up with Nina to talk to her about the book. This month she published her second book The Art of Relevance, which builds on and in many ways goes beyond the first, exploring the importance of relevance to the museum sector.Įvery museum will of course think that it is relevant to it’s audiences, but The Art of Relevance makes you look again and realise that relevance is a much more complex subject than you might imagine. That book went on to become one of the most influential publications in the museum sector, pushing participatory practice into the mainstream. It’s been six years since Nina Simon, the Executive Director of Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History (MAH) released The Participatory Museum.

Nina simon the participatory museum